


Sisters

by Gimmemocha



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 14:37:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3654036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gimmemocha/pseuds/Gimmemocha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quinn has only one goal: find her sister. But in a post-Reaper universe, that's not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, most of the relays were destroyed in the pulse of bizarre energy that destroyed the Reapers. Communications are slow, when they work at all, and travel is largely long stretches of waiting to get there. But she's determined to find out what happened to her missing sibling. Unfortuantely for her, the people who were responsible for it have found her first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sisters

Quinn reached around behind her to lock her sniper rifle back into place and flinched as something pulled improperly. "Ow," she muttered, moving slower. The nanites would do their job – eventually – but until they fixed enough cells or fibers or whatever to make a difference, moving quickly would just re-stress the muscles and create more problems.

She supposed she should be grateful for the nanite package. It wasn't something she'd had originally, but Terri had insisted.

Speaking of whom…

She lifted her left arm and activated her omni-tool, then began tapping a message on the orange light surrounding her forearm.

**Situation handled. May have reconsidered that implant, though.**

She didn't wait for a reply, but headed for her extraction point. Such as it was. The op had been, for her, a quiet one but there was no denying that it would attract attention. She meant to be gone before it got there.

Her arm vibrated and she glanced down at the return message. 

**Terri: Still getting ghosts?**

**Yep. That's not supposed to happen, right?**

It wasn't something any of them could explain. She had never had a biotic implant. She rightly had no memory of using one, of training with one. If given a test on biotics, she'd have….

Well, no, she'd have passed as much as anyone could. She knew what they were, what they were capable of, but that didn't explain why, in times of stress, she defaulted to trying to activate them.

The operative difference between instinct and muscle memory was pretty damned slim, when you came right down to it.

**Terri: No. Cat says the same thing, though. Doesn't matter why, but if it's affecting combat, we may want to get them just to be on the safe side.**

Her mouth quirked, lifted on the right side, just half a grin. That kind of focus was something else they all shared. Why only mattered when you had time to think. Results, that mattered more in a situation. 

**Not gonna say it's not causing some glitches. Nothing like leaving cover because you expect a barrier to come up and it doesn't.**

So that would pretty much settle the matter. She didn't need Terri's reply to know that her sister would be checking inventory for implants. And, because thoroughness was key, she even knew what kind of implant she'd be getting: L5n. Not the newest, not the best, but the most familiar. The one that would react the way her reflexes were expecting it to act.

Which meant a trip back home.

Quinn swung herself out of the broken window and onto the ledge, heading for her ship hidden in the jungle and tried not to think too much about that. On the one hand, Cat would probably make the same trip and seeing her sisters together again would be beyond good. 

On the other hand, she hated home.

Her omni-tool buzzed again, letting her know there was a message pending, but she ignored it for now. She wanted both hands free. The catwalk hadn't been all that sturdy when Cerberus had first installed it, and the intervening years hadn't been kind. Some projects had gotten huge budgets, some had gotten enough to see where the results led. No matter how many of these former bases Quinn raided, the one rule that applied was that scientists focused on the science and usually didn't bother with technical details like structural integrity or clear lines of escape.

The building pods themselves were pretty standard issue, though they could vary in size. Internal layouts could be changed or modified, creating everything from living quarters to high tech labs. But the placement of the pods seemed to be based entirely on "wherever they land" when they were plopped down from a dropship.

And once something happened – as it almost inevitably did when Cerberus operations were involved – the layout turned rapidly into a deathtrap.

Her tool buzzed a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth.

She braced her back against the wall and splayed her legs to ride the swaying, creaking catwalk as best she could.

**Terri: Your ship's being pinged.**

**Terri: Hang on, checking the energy signature.**

**Terri: Alliance frigate.**

**Terri: GET EYES ON IT.**

An Alliance ship? Out here?

Most of the relays still hadn't been repaired since the Reaper invasion. Terri said that some of the capital planets had functioning relays again, but last they'd heard anything from Earth, the Citadel was still broken and pieces of its relay were floating adrift. 

Then again, communications weren't what they had been before the Reapers, either. Maybe they'd finally put everything back together again. They certainly had the bulk of the civilized galaxy's armies with them. That many techs and engineers, that much manpower, should've been able to handle getting it up and running.

Assuming they hadn't devolved into trying to kill each other.

And every Alliance ship should have been at Earth. There shouldn't have been any left in the Terminus system. There really shouldn't have been one here, on this backwater planet.

She swept a hand across her omni-tool, reconfigured it to listen in on standard Alliance channels.

Nothing.

If there were an Alliance team here, they were either on radio silence or they weren't using Alliance signals. Even if they'd upgraded their encryption since the last time Quinn had gotten a download, she should've heard the garbled buzzing of encryption.

On a hunch, she flipped around to the Spectre side of things.

"…of a firefight here, Major," she heard. "Someone collateral damaged the shit outta these guys."

The voice was human.

"The data's gone. Wiped," she heard, identifying the vocal vibration of a turian. "We're too late, but not by much. The bodies are still warm."

Alliance frigate with a turian crewmember? Might explain the Spectre frequency, anyway. Most Spectres were turians, after all. Still, she didn't like the feeling in her gut. 

_C'mon,_ she thought. _Even my luck can't be that bad._

Then she heard the reply.

"Joker, any sign that ship's powering up?"

That voice, she did recognize. Kaidan Alenko, major in the Alliance Navy, second ever human Spectre. And long-time lover of one Commander Kate Shepard.

This was worse than bad. This was the nightmare scenario.

"Negative, Major," she heard Joker reply. "It's just sitting there, all tiny and cute. Want me to land on it?"

"I don't think that'll be necessary just yet. But if it tries to take off, let me know. I may reconsider."

Quinn frowned. Her ship was not tiny. OK, it was as small as you could make a ship with a mass effect core, but it was designed to be flown solo. It was simply compact. Efficient.

"See if you can find any other comm signals," Alenko said. "They have to still be here, whoever they are."

"Aye aye, Major."

Shit. She couldn't even risk sending a message, not if the Normandy was listening for her. Still, if she just vanished, Terri would come looking. Or, more likely, send Cat. That would be worse. She risked it. One quick blip, right?

**Miranda**

"Uh, Major? There was something, but not much. I'd say odds are they know we're here and just went radio silent."

"Roger that, Joker. Keep your guard up, people. Cerberus is bad enough, but I want to know who's raiding their bases and what they're doing with the intel. We find the attackers."

"You think they're just going to volunteer the information?" the turian asked.

Garrus, she told herself. You know it's Garrus Vakarian.

"Never know," Alenko said. "We ask nicely. If they refuse, we ask not-so-nicely."

She kept listening to the chatter while she headed toward the ground. They didn't, couldn't, know she had access to the Spectre comm channel, so they didn't know she was listening in. They also expected a team, which was sort of flattering, really. And it meant one person might slip away while they looked for a handful.

"Something's off about this, Major," she heard the other human say. She still couldn't identify him, but the Normandy had carried an odd assortment of people when it had fled Earth. At least, it had based on what intel Terri had gotten her hands on. The unknown human could be anyone. Probably Alliance military, someone evacced from Earth either when the Reapers first invaded or at the Battle of Sol. The last reports they'd had said that the Normandy was slated for Sword.

"What've you got, James?"

"Check out these scorch marks. Three dead guys, but they're all firing on the same position. They were just targeting one person."

"And they all died from return fire from the front. They weren't flanked," added Vakarian, thoughtful. 

"What, you're saying one person did all this?"

"I'm just saying, it's off. And yeah, here at least, one person killed all three of these guys."

"Of course, they are just Cerberus forces," Vakarian added, dryly. "Let's not overestimate their attacker. For all we know it was some kid with a gun and the ability to duck."

James' snort of laughter didn't get picked up by his mike, but it did by Alenko's as the major responded. "One person with a grudge against Cerberus and good aim. Not seeing any evidence of biotics, though."

"Guess it's not Jack," Vakarian said.

"Let's keep moving. Remember, questions first. Shoot later."

"Taking all the fun out of it, Major."

A wistful yearning spread through her, making her gut ache. It surprised her a little. She didn't know those people, not personally. She knew their dossiers, knew their records, had studied them as a precursor to avoiding them. To staying out of their way if worse came to worst. But she didn't know them.

Maybe it was just a desire for that closeness they had, for that sense of camaraderie, of team, of belonging. Of family. She knew she had that, craved it. 

So did the others. Hell, Cat had even formed up her own team to try and satisfy that urge to connect. Quinn had considered it, but mercs were a far damned cry from family. They knew they could leave any time, and everyone knew they were only there because you paid them to be.

Of course, military teams were only there because of orders, but you were all there because of orders. It was the basis, where it started. You bitched about orders, about bad food, and about higher-ups who all had it cushy and easy and didn't know what it took to be a real soldier anymore. 

She frowned as she ducked and crab-walked under a window. Not that she knew that, either. Or should know that.

She really had to get home.

But to do that, she had to get off Mistral and back to the base.

"I think they got out before we got here, Major."

Alenko sighed. "Yeah, looks like. Joker, you got anything?"

"Hard to say. The jungle's all… y'know, jungley. I mean, yeah, there's living things and heat signatures but we don't even know if your target's human so it's hard to say how big it is, even if I could isolate just one heat source."

Well, that was a bit of good luck she hadn't looked for.

"All right. Well, whoever it is, isn't leaving without their ship. Let's double-time it back there and sit on it. Figuratively, Joker."

"James is right, Kaidan. You take all the fun out of it."

Damn. He was right about that, she wasn't leaving without her ship. She knew SOP on the Normandy was for the shuttle to drop them off and dust off, so she couldn't even steal their ship.

Not that it could outrun the Normandy, but then neither could her ship. And, she admitted, she was a good pilot but Joker was one of the best. He'd probably make the Normandy do a few loop-de-loops around her while she tried to outfly him, just to prove a point.

So her best bet was to hide out, wait for them to get bored, and then sneak out after they left. They couldn't sit in orbit indefinitely, right?

Right?

Quinn slithered into the cover of the jungle and sighed, wondering how long it would be before Terri got sick of her silence and sent Cat to look for her.

 

Two days later, she began to debate running for it.

For one thing, she was running out of emergency food supplies. Water, at least, was plentiful and her nanites would handle anything unfortunate enough to try and hitch a ride in her digestive tract. They knew what bacteria belonged and what didn't. 

For another, without a ground team dirtside, there were no comms she could tap. They were up there on the ship, chatting to each other face to face. She couldn't even be sure there was a ship up there anymore, not with her limited equipment. If she could get to her ship, she'd know, but they had to be watching it. If they were still there.

She squatted in the foliage and stared at her ship. It didn't look tampered with. If anyone was in there, they hadn't come out. Odds certainly favored everyone waiting on the Normandy for her to lift off and catching her then.

She chewed contemplatively on a food stick and debated with herself, pitting what she knew about Major Alenko against the data she knew she had. How badly did he want it? How badly did he want her? 

What the hell were they looking for?

One thing she was sure of, it wasn't the same thing she, Terri, and Cat were searching for.

She rubbed her face and stared at her ship some more.

If she had to run for it, her ship was smaller. That could be both good and bad. It might mean she could lose the Normandy in landscape features long enough to let her climb for height, put a planet or moon or two between the ships, then bolt for the nearest shipping lane. With the relays dead, local shipping lanes had gotten a hell of a lot more crowded. She could lose them long enough to hit the nearest relay.

The problem would be trying outfly Joker. She'd need more than luck, she'd need a damned miracle.

Well, no point being stupid about it. She pulled her helmet up and over her head and engaged the filter so nothing of her identity showed. If they were in there, they'd have to capture her to find out who she was and they were good.

She was better.

No point in trying a stealthy approach, either. They were either waiting for her or they weren't. She walked up to her ship, keeping her steps loose and light, hands off her weapon. She might fight them, but she wouldn't kill them.

She didn't delay inside the ship, either, but sealed and locked the door behind her. Once it sealed, she took a long look around. Since it had a mass effect core, the ship was too large to be seen in a glance. It had two levels and was long enough fore and aft to require bulkheads for safety. It wasn't as large as even the first Normandy, but as a one person ship, it was positively huge.

The level of automation that was required to run it was likewise impressive. It was, in fact, a backup of the VI that had been installed on the SR2, but for reasons none of the quite understood, it wasn't an AI. It was a VI.

Then again, EDI had feigned VI-hood successfully for a long time. Maybe her ship was too. 

Paranoia kept her silent. She didn't dare speak. She could search the ship before takeoff, but there were enough nooks and crannies that she couldn't search it well enough for paranoia so there wasn't any point in searching at all. Instead, she made for the cockpit.

And walked into a pistol pointed at her head.

"About time you showed up," Kaidan Alenko told her. "The data. Hand it over."

Shit.

He had parked himself on her ship and waited for two days? He was without a doubt the most stubborn, mule-headed…

…person she'd ever had pointing a pistol at her.

How much of a close-up blast could her armor take?

His pistol nudged a little higher. "Don't even think about it, lady," he said.

She took one more second.

Fuck it.

She ducked and swept under his pistol. He didn't shoot. He could have, could've taken off her head if he'd wanted to. Instead, he let her engage.

Well, for him it wasn't a bad move. He was bigger than she was, stronger than she was, and had most of the same training she'd had.

Most of it.

And he didn't have a helmet on.

Her armored palm cracked under his chin, though it cost her his elbow on her shoulder. She twisted from the blow, taking some of the force from her strike to do it, but her armor had lent her enough power that it knocked him backwards, deeper into the cockpit.

He caught one of her arms, tangling it with is, aiming another punch at the same shoulder to disable her arm. Classic Navy combat technique. Sad for him she knew the counter, one perfect for her lighter frame and smaller build. She whipped herself around him, spun over his back, and threw him to the ground.

He didn't bother to get up, just swept her feet, making her jump to keep from getting dropped, then spun away to his feet. 

But this time, he had the door to his back and she was in the cockpit.

His palm snapped up and blue light flared. Invisible forces lifted her off her feet.

Fucking biotics. She really, really needed that implant.

With a gesture, he slammed her against one bulkhead, then the other. Armor or no, her breath whooped out of her, diaphragm sufficiently stunned that getting her breath back was going to take a moment. 

Training helped, but only some, and when the biotic clamp released, she dropped to a crouch that let her attack immediately, if weaker.

She didn't want to bring him down, wasn't sure she could without hurting him, not in that armor. What she needed to do was knock him backwards, and she used a flurry of punches and elbow strikes to encourage him to step away from her assault.

His head was still bare, a weak spot, and there wasn't a fighter alive who didn't duck away from an armored fist coming at their face. That made it easier to see his frown.

The next biotic wave threw her straight back, against the console.

"Stop," he said, palm out. "Just wait. Wait."

She waited, trying to get her breath back, taking the moment he gave her for her shoulder to stop buzzing.

"I know those moves. Those are fleet moves. Who the hell are you? Alliance?"

Shit. He should know her fighting style; most of it was straight out of the book. Some of it was Cerberus-specific. But talking with him, giving him any time, that was dangerous. Overloading-core level of dangerous. If he decided he was more interested in her identity than the data, she was beyond screwed. So were Terri and Cat.

She hadn't wanted to risk sending the data, not with the possibility that Joker and the Normandy was still in orbit listening for any transmissions from the planet. But she could make a copy. That's what mattered, right? She had the data. She could give a copy of it to Alenko.

Slowly, as unthreateningly as she could, she lifted her arm and flicked on her omni-tool, then carefully nodded her head to him.

After a moment, wary but curious, he did the same.

Her fingers tapped on the projected command menu. He had his locked down, but the codes were Spectre encryption and that was no problem for her. She hesitated before sending, before forcing the connection. 

No, he didn't need the extra clues. She waited, looking up at him again, waiting while he read the 'incoming files' signal.

Her ears twitched as her comms picked up a transmission, the turian again. "If you want me to take her, Major, just move one step to your left. But you're in my shot right now."

Kaidan didn't respond, probably didn't want her to realize someone else was there. Vakarian. She couldn't see him past Alenko, tried to work out where he could be. Somewhere he had a straight shot at her. Top of the stairway, maybe. So he'd been in engineering.

Maybe he'd calibrated something. That'd be nice.

But Kaidan didn't move. Instead, he slid a finger over his omni-tool. Hers beeped at her to let her know the connection had established, and she sent the data flowing across empty air.

There was a lot of it.

"You took out an entire base of Cerberus troops," he said. "I don't think we're enemies."

She didn't answer. Her helmet didn't have any way to disguise her voice.

"Garrus tells me some of the shots you took were nice. From him, that's a serious compliment."

Sniper training. All of them were good at it. Patience came with practice but the innate qualities that made someone a superior sniper were genetic. She remembered hours in the simulator, competing against Terri and Cat. She had won slightly more often than they had, but her approach to it was different. They were all good at it, but only Quinn loved it.

"No biotics, though. No aptitude for it, or just didn't want the headaches? Not that I blame you."

Alenko was an L2. His headaches were, if his medical files were anything to go by, one step below debilitating. That he took them in stride was part of what made him such an impressive soldier. He never flinched in combat, never gave any hint that the feedback was neurological hell.

She still didn't answer him.

"C'mon, you could at least tell me your name. What'm I supposed to call you in my report? Unknown female? You should get some credit."

She didn't want credit. She wanted him to get the hell off her ship.

"And hey, good job to whoever programmed your VI. It shut us out cold."

That made her skin freeze in her suit. It hadn't even occurred to her yet that they'd had two days' access to her ship, her records, her logs.

"Our setup's no slouch, and it's had some upgrades, but even Tali says she can't break it without triggering a total system wipe."

Tali Zorah vas… What? vas'Normandy, she supposed.

She hadn't known about the system wipe safeguard, but it was certainly good to know it was there. Hell, if Quinn had been in charge of it, she'd set it up so an unsuccessful hacking attempt on an empty ship resulted in the ship self-destructing. She'd speak to Terri about it. Maybe not while it was docked, nothing that would take out innocents.

"Look, you're using Alliance moves but this isn't an Alliance ship. Did you get stranded out here? Don't tell me you turned merc."

He wasn't giving up. Shaking her head, she tapped a message on her omni and sent it to his.

**Sorry, Major. That's classified.**

He looked down, then back up at her, a tiny smile that did something to her insides she didn't stop to think about too closely. "Major, huh? Well if you know that, then you know who I am. That means you know I'm also a Council Spectre. There's no such thing as classified from me."

 _You have no idea how wrong you are,_ she thought. _Especially from you, this is classified._ But she just shook her head, slowly.

His grin spread. It wasn't fake. His chocolate-dark eyes held sparks of his laughter, crinkles appeared at the corners of them. "You know all I have to do is get that helmet off you."

She shrugged and pushed away from the console she'd been leaning against and brought her hands up.

He chuckled. "Okay, okay. At ease, soldier."

Quinn realized she was smiling and made herself stop. How could he manage to banter with her when they weren't even speaking? She had to get him the hell off her ship.

Her omni-tool beeped. The data copy was complete.

Quinn lifted one hand higher and waved to him.

He looked down at his wrist, then up at her. He hesitated.

Quinn turned the motion from a wave to a backward flip of her hand, brushing him away.

"Did… did you just shoo me?"

She repeated the gesture more emphatically, nodding her head and taking a step toward him.

"Okay, okay, I'm leaving." He took a step back, hands up. "It's just…" He lowered his hands again and shook his head slowly, frowning a little as his eyes looked her over from head to toe. "There's something familiar about you."

 _Are you kidding me?_ Her eyes widened where he couldn't see it. One swift stride forward closed the distance between them, the flats of her palms slamming against his chest, knocking him that one last inch out of the cockpit. She hit the controls and the door hissed closed, locking on her command.

Turning swiftly to the flight panel, she opened the hatch and started the engines. If they couldn't take that hint, they deserved to get spaced.

Still, she looked out the view screen. If she leaned, she could see them double-timing it down the ramp. Alenko first out, the turian behind him was absolutely Garrus Vakarian, and with them was a darker-skinned human she didn't recognize. Before they were even completely down, she brought the ramp into the ship.

Alenko walked toward the nose of the ship, looking up at her.

She met his gaze. Her hands froze on the controls.

His eyes narrowed.

Her fist slammed down on the panel, sending the ship leaping toward the safety of the empty skies.

 

Not until she had run every security and safety check she could think of did she try connecting with Terri. And even then, she swept the cockpit for bugs and kept the door closed.

"You're sure he didn't recognize you?"

"He recognized something," Quinn said. "He said I was familiar. But no. If he'd seen me, heard me, you think I would've gotten out of there without any casualties?"

Terri thought it over. "No," she said finally. "You think they bugged the ship?"

"I'd bet on it. Maybe even have a tracker somewhere but nothing I can find. Might be outside, on the hull. You know Alenko as well as I do. He strike you as the sloppy type?"

"Not particularly." Her sister sighed, looked down as she thought. "Plan?"

"Dump the ship. Send in a team to scrub it after I wipe the computer. Swap ships with the team."

"I like it. Head for Omega."

"I'm on it."

"Quinn?"

She tilted her head to one side, paused in the act of closing the connection.

"Just… What was he like?"

It had cost Terri to ask. Love and respect made her eat the cost of answering. She just nodded a little, enough to show she understood why Terri had to ask. "I get it," she said by way of explaining. That's what he had been like. She got it. "And…"

"And?" Terri prompted when there was no follow-up.

"Okay, I know this is weird but he was familiar. Like I knew him. I knew how to… joke with him. I knew his fighting moves. That's weird, right?"

"Weird."

Quinn dismissed it, shaking her head. "Ah, forget it. Maybe I just think I should know him."

"We'll talk about it when you're back." She held up a tiny chip. "Implants."

"L5n?"

"Of course."

It brought her smile back. "Cat coming home?"

"On her way as soon as she can exfil."

"She need backup?"

Terri snorted a laugh. "Think she'd admit it?"

Quinn's return laugh was identical. Of course. "Do any of us?"

"Watch your six."

"Yeah yeah."

The call disconnected, spinning into a Cerberus symbol.

Quinn leaned back in the pilot's seat, planning to sleep until Omega. It was hours out.

She thought about Kaidan Alenko until she fell asleep and dreamed of nothing she could ever remember.

 

Some eight million souls on Omega, only about a tenth of those were human. _Then again, this being Omega, they probably can't find a soul to share among them._ Still, in that throng, even Quinn could hide.

"Last we heard, Aria made it back to Omega so maybe stay clear of her. Afterlife got one hell of a redecoration, but news out of Omega is she wouldn't give Petrovsky the satisfaction of ruining the club for her. So avoid it, and you should be all clear."

"Copy that."

"The scrub team is waiting. The outside of the ship is clear and I'm not getting word the Normandy's docked. But take that for what it's worth."

The Normandy's stealth systems were more than good enough to defeat anything her little ship had on it, and if Omega had detected it but it were going by another name, Omega wouldn't out it.

"I'll keep the helmet on," she said. "It'll attract attention, but I just need to get on the scrub team's ship and take off."

Terri hesitated. "You think they followed you."

She nodded. "Yeah." She didn't even try to explain why. Terri knew. Instinct. Instinct could be honed, but not trained. It was innate. Or maybe Quinn was just done trusting to luck. Plan for the worst.

"You headed straight back?"

"We'll see how it feels when I take off," she said. "I might drop in somewhere else first, see if I've picked up a tail."

"Understood."

She sighed and stood, sealing her helmet in place again. What she wanted to do was head straight home. But doing so would just mean putting her family in jeopardy, and that she would never do. Faceplate secure, she headed for the lock.

As Terri had promised, waiting for her at the foot of the ramp was a team. They weren't wearing any identifiable symbols, but that had been one of Terri's first commands. No Cerberus operative wore Cerberus tags. Not anymore.

Given the disfavor the group was in, it wasn't a bad idea. Still, it wouldn't hurt for them to come up with something new.

The leader of the group held out a datapad to her.

She took it, noting it had a DNA lock. She quirked half a smile. No doubting who that had come from, then. She stripped off one glove and let the thing take a skin sample, so thin she didn't even feel it. But it beeped and unlocked, and she handed it back. 

Security, such as could be had. The teams didn't know what they were to do, not the ones assigned to her or Cat. They only had unhackable data pads. Credits and mission stats didn't unlock until the pad got safely to one of them.

The leader looked at the display, then up at her and nodded. He hooked a thumb behind him. "Our ship's in slot A40." He then lifted his wrist, the ubiquitous orange flare of his omni-tool activating. "Tap in, I'll give you the codes."

She waved him off and activated the mike in her helmet. "Not needed. If it's one of our ships, I can get on it."

He accepted that with a nod. "Don't come crying to me if you get locked out," he said. Then he turned to his crew. "Mop-up job," he said. 

She didn't watch them go up the ramp, just hefted her small bag over her shoulder – thankfully healed after a couple of days' rest while in-transit – and headed for the lift.

The instant before the lift doors closed, a hand interposed itself. The door sprang open, and Kaidan Alenko stepped onto the elevator.

He kept his back to the door and stared at her.

When it began moving, he hit the emergency stop.

She waited, tense, and very glad paranoia had made her wear her armor instead of pack it out.

"Here's what we know," he said after a minute. "We know your ship isn't registered anywhere. We also know your drive core is from an old Cerberus freighter. We know the people you met belonged to a Cerberus ops team. And we know someone's been raiding known Cerberus facilities for the last six months."

His eyes weren't warm anymore, they were dark and cold. The line of his jaw was set, tight. "So basically what I'm figuring is you _are_ Cerberus. Putting your pieces back together and getting ready to start that whole shitstorm up again."

Quinn reached up to her helmet. Two days ago, it hadn't had any kind of way to disguise her voice. Now it did. "You're wrong, Major."

"Really? So when my guys finish taking your ship apart – and thanks for unlocking that datapad for us, by the way – we won't find any evid—"

That was as far as Quinn let him get.

He had time to block her as she exploded off the wall, but not enough time to correct her follow-up. He had worn his armor as well, but though armor protected the groin, it didn't protect the inner thigh and his leg collapsed when her armored knee slammed into it. She leaped as he dropped, braced one foot on his back, and sliced the extended blade of her omni-tool into the ceiling, sending the panel flying. Her other hand caught the edge.

Alenko grabbed her waist with both hands and threw her into the corner of the elevator. Before she could get up, he had a gun out and pointed at her head.

"No more games," he said. "Helmet off. Now."

She studied his expressions. He'd do it, she decided. He'd shoot her, kill her, then take off her helmet anyway. 

"Shit," she muttered, climbing slowly to her feet.

"Gently," he suggested, when she lifted her hands to her helmet.

The fastenings released with a soft hiss and she tugged it free, shaking her hair out of her face.

His eyes widened, his arms dropping limply to his sides. "My god," he whispered. "Shepard? _Kate_?"

"It's no—"

Whatever she'd been about to say became a muffled sound lost in his mouth. His hand wrapped around the back of her neck, pulling her deeper into the kiss. His lips devoured hers, hungry, impatient, demanding. His tongue sought out the soft lining of her lips, teasing her with feelings she hadn't known were real. 

His arm wrapped around her and pulled her close against him, ignoring the armor they both wore. The pistol hung near her side, forgotten now in his grasp. He bent her slightly backwards over his arm.

It wasn't that Quinn didn't return his kisses. It was that she had no idea how to. But what the hell, she was a fast learner and this didn't seem like the time for thinking.

At least, not until his urgent kisses trailed off, not until he pulled back slightly. 

Her shocked eyes met his, saw the growing confusion in them. When she stepped back out of his arms, he let her.

"Kate—" 

Quinn swung the helmet like a baseball bat and hit him in the jaw, dropping him instantly into unconsciousness.

 

She couldn't talk to Terri. Her helmet comm didn't reach that far, and she couldn't patch directly into any comms system that could, not without getting back to her ship. And once she got there, she'd have to take out the Alliance team that had taken the place of the team Terri had sent.

Too trusting. She'd been too trusting by half. Now she had to fix her fuck-up before Major Pain-in-the-ass woke up, before they found out about her sisters. Alenko would never give up the trail now, wouldn't stop looking for her. One thing they were sure of: Kate Shepard had died when the Citadel exploded. The last official word anyone had on the battle was that two people had survived the run for the beam, had made it to the Citadel. 

From there, it was all extrapolation. The energy surge, the point of likely origin, the effects. Every model they ran said the same thing; the Citadel wouldn't have survived a detonation like that. And Kate Shepard had been on the Citadel.

If Major Alenko thought his Kate had survived somehow, had made it back out to the Terminus systems, he'd move planets to find her again.

Only Quinn wasn't Kate Shepard.

 _Focus,_ she told herself. _One thing at a time. Get to the ship. That's this step. Get to the ship._

Fortunately, it wasn't a long climb, and she pried the lift doors open with the unbreakable blade from her omni-tool. Her emergence into the hallway didn't even cause much of a stir. This was Omega, after all. One armored human climbing out of an elevator shaft was pretty much just Tuesday afternoon around here.

She double-timed it back to her ship. Alenko would be on comms the minute he woke up, sending his people after her.

The boarding tube was still extended and the hatch unlocked when she opened it. Two of the five-man crew were in the cabin she entered, pistol out. Their hands went up immediately.

"Get down," she snapped.

Slowly, carefully, they went to their knees. "Uh, Cap? We got an issue, here."

The captain, the one who'd handed her the data pad, came out of the cockpit and frowned at her. "What the hell?"

"You have three seconds to prove to me you're not an Alliance squad," she said.

"Okay. Okay, just… Let me call our contact."

"You reach for the comms, you lose your arm."

"Lady, I don't have any other way of verifying I am who I say I am. It's not like we get sent out with ID cards."

He had a point.

"Shit," she muttered again. 

_Step two, secure the data._ The team was actually irrelevant. Without proof, they had nothing. They hadn't seen her face, or Terri's so even if they were one of Terri's teams and were captured, they couldn't reveal anything. "Drop the pads," she said. "Everyone against the wall. Get the rest of your men up here."

She waited, keeping her back to the passageway to the cockpit while the other two equally confused members of the team came up from the engineering deck. Then she patted them down one by one, taking anything electronic off them, anything at all, and throwing it into the ship.

"Everyone off."

The comms in her cockpit crackled to life. "Kate? Dammit, Kate, answer me."

She shoved them into the access tube, then grabbed the Captain. "When you hit the station, scatter. Wanna prove you are who you say you are? Rig the tube so it won't retract." Then she shut the hatch on them and sprinted for the cockpit.

"I know you're there. Look, just talk to me, tell me what's going on. What're you doing out here?"

She tried to ignore that voice, ignore the pain she could hear, the buried panic. Her fingers flew across the controls, setting commands, overriding security and safety measures in turn.

"I know you're not with Cerberus. No one's listening, it's just me. Please, just…" She heard him sigh, heard his voice turn slightly muffled as if he'd dropped his head to the panel. "Please talk to me."

She hesitated. Her eyes flicked to the comms. This was exactly what she'd wanted to spare him. But she couldn't explain, either. She touched the button, hesitated again, then pressed down. "I'm sorry," she said. Then she switched channels, sent one message, just one word, to Terri.

**Oriana**

She jammed her helmet on. The ship vibrated around her, engines warming up. Quinn sprinted for the hatch and opened it as the ship detached and slid away from Omega.

Explosive decompression sent everything hissing out into space.

Including Quinn.

The force of it sent her tumbling, but she supposed she owed the Captain an apology. The docking ring had stayed extended, and she slammed into it. Her hands scrambled for a hold, and she twisted herself around, throwing herself down the length of the tube while her ship pivoted and flew out deeper into the asteroid belt.

"One mass effect, two mass effect, three mass effect," she counted, pushing herself toward the far hatch through the zero gravity of the tube.

She reached the hatch at seven. Got through it by nine. Missed the explosion of her ship at twelve waiting for the buffer area to repressurize.

When the far door opened, Alenko was waiting for her.

Behind him was Garrus Vakarian, and the other human. James.

None of them looked happy.

"You gotta be kidding me," she sighed.

Alenko reached down and took her helmet off her.

"It's not her, Kaidan," Garrus warned.

"I know," he said, grim and cold.

"I say we kill it," James offered. "Before it goes nuts."

"Hey," she snapped. "Right here, y'know."

"Shut up," James said.

"Let's get her back to the Normandy," Alenko said. "We're not deciding anything out here."

"You want her on the ship? All due respect, Major, are you loco?"

"Maybe," he acknowledged. He touched his earpiece. "Joker. How long would it take you to reconfigure things so the ship only responded to authorized handprints?"

Without her helmet on, she couldn't hear the response, but the turian huffed a quick breath of laughter.

"Sometimes the old ways are best," Alenko said. "Get on it. Double-time."

Handprints. Her voice was Shepard's, her body was Shepard's, even her genetics were Shepard's. But handprints weren't genetic.

They knew she was a clone.

And there was only one way the could've worked it out that fast.

Quinn didn't fight, didn't argue, didn't even drag her feet when they walked her back to the Normandy.

James did give her a shove in the back, though, when they got on board. She couldn't help but linger to stare. The ship was as much a part of the Shepard legend as the woman herself. To be here, where she had spent so much time, done so much…

Heads turned to stare at her as the trio walked her to a glass-walled conference room. None of the stares were particularly friendly. Word got around ship pretty fast, she supposed.

A guard stood sentinel at each doorway into the small space that held the conference room. Two more came in after they were seated and stood facing the glass. James leaned against the far wall, cradling an assault rifle. Vakarian, at least, didn't have a gun drawn, but he looked plenty lethal just staring at her.

Alenko took a seat at the opposite end of the table.

"Okay," he said. "We know you're a clone. We know Cerberus made you when they brought Kate back. How many of you are there?"

"How'd you know I'm a clone?" she asked in return.

"You're not here to ask questions, puta, you're here to answer them."

She frowned at James. Whoever he was, he had a serious workout fixation. He was half again as broad as Alenko, and she didn't think it was fat his armor was hiding, not with that wide neck and chiseled features. "You know, you've got an anger management problem," she told him. "Might wanna lay off the juice for awhile."

"What?" he said, pushing off the wall.

She scooted her chair back, ready to rise.

Alenko held up one hand. "James."

After a minute, he slammed his shoulders back against the wall, black eyes throwing hate and anger at her.

Alenko studied her. After a moment, he said quietly, "You have a name?"

Even that was a clue, if he were smart enough. And he'd been smart enough so far. He had figured out she was a clone, had figured out what the extended tube meant. So she kept her mouth shut.

_One step at a time. Next step, find out where your sister is._

To do that, she had to talk.

And lie.

A lot.

"I don't have one."

He rubbed his chin. "We'll go with Jane Doe."

"Jane," she said. "Really? That's the best you can do?"

"Hey, I'm open to suggestions."

"Fine. Jane it is."

"Great. Jane, then. How many of you are there, Jane?"

They knew she was a clone because they'd met another clone before. A clone of Kate Shepard. Her sister. They had to know where she was now. "Two," she said.

"Convenient," Vakarian murmured.

"How are we supposed to trust that?" Alenko asked her.

"How were you planning to trust me when you asked?" 

"She even talks like the real Shepard," Vakarian said.

"C'mon, Major, let's just kill it. Before it goes nuts, too."

"Too?" she asked, eyes snapping to James. "What happened to her?"

Before he could answer, Alenko interrupted, still quiet. "What's your name?"

Which of them needed an answer more? She stared into Alenko's face. He knew she wasn't Kate. He knew, but looking at her still hurt him. She was stabbing him in the gut a thousand times for every minute he looked at her. 

Damn. He didn't deserve what she was going to do to him.

She could use that, would use that. She needed her answers. She'd get her answer, find some way to get it to Terri, and then…

_One step at a time._

She softened her expression, let some of her actual sympathy for him leak through as she met his gaze. "Kate," she said softly. "My name is Kate Shepard."

The words hit him harder than her helmet had.

"Fuck that," James snapped.

"Yeah," Alenko said after a minute. "I think we'll stick with Jane."

She shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"You've been taking out Cerberus bases, wiping out the data. Why?"

"I'm looking for the other clone," she said. "I know there was one, but she wasn't there when I woke up. She's…" She paused, chewed on the inside of her lip. Nervous habits weren't genetic, but she knew it was a habit of Kate's, so she used it. Across the table, Alenko sucked in a quick breath. "She's my sister," she finished finally.

"Yeah well your sister's dead," James said.

Five words. Five words drove all thought of strategy, of tactics, of anything but a flare of pain out of her head. Somewhere, she supposed she deserved it for all the pain she was causing them. "What?" she asked softly, eyes wide, shocked, staring at James.

Alenko was already on his feet, blocking her view of the other human. "James, wait outside."

"What? Major—"

"Outside. Now."

Quinn made herself stare at the table instead, at her hands on the flat top. Dead. They'd been searching for so long… How had no one known about this? Would Cat and Terri ever find out about her, about Quinn, when she died?

Had anyone cared?

"I'm sorry," Alenko said after a moment. 

"How—" But the question didn't need clarifying beyond that. "How?"

"She tried to steal Kate's identity," Alenko said. "Tried to kill us and her. Take her place. She even broke into the Citadel archives to change handprints so she could prove she was the real Shepard. Then she stole the Normandy and in the fight to take it back, she died."

"Who did it?"

"No one," he said, an edge of warning to his tone. Warning her off thoughts of revenge, maybe. "There was a fight in the cargo bay, the doors opened. She slipped. Kate tried to help her up, but she just let go. She fell."

What? That brought her head back up. Suicide? "Why?"

"Look, if you want to know, I'll tell you. I'll even let you watch the security vids of it, if you want. But I need answers, too. How many of you are there?"

Quinn closed her eyes again. She could still protect her sisters. The ones left alive. "Two," she said again. "One now."

"Who woke you up?"

The best lies, she knew, were those that contained some elements of truth. So she shook together a cocktail of truth and fabrication. Enough of the former so that she could keep it straight, mixed with enough of the latter to make it impossible for anyone to know what the truth was.

"No one," she said. "I fell out of my tank on a Cerberus station in the Horsehead Nebula. When the power goes out, tanks don't go dark. They release. I kicked the power back on and started trying to figure out…" She shrugged. "Hell, everything, I guess. Who I was. Where I was."

"You didn't know you were a clone," Alenko said.

She shook her head, staring at nothing in particular in the center of the table. "Not until a few days later. When I found the files on Project Lazarus."

"The codename for the project that brought Shepard back to life," Vakarian said.

Quinn nodded a little. "Turns out you don't just practice on the one body you have. You make copies. Practice on them. There were… Well, let's just say Cerberus believed in redundant backups. They made lots of copies. They killed them all, then used Lazarus research to try and bring them back. They failed."

She looked up at Alenko. "A lot. I watched them go through body after body. What the hell, right? We were just clones. I heard them say it, time after time. Just breed another one. This one failed. Get me another clone. Like we were tissue paper.

"Anyway, when I found out one had gone missing, I figured I wasn't quite so alone in the universe. So I thought I'd track her down. That's the short version, anyway."

"If you're tank-bred," Vakarian said, "how'd you know how to… do anything? You restarted the power on the station, you said."

"Same way any tank-bred anything learns," she said. "They dumped it into my brain. They needed some… memories, some learning, some stored knowledge so they could make sure that the person they brought back would have the same memories they'd died with. And if you're going to do it, why not do it right? I got all the training they could program into me."

"Like fighting," Alenko murmured.

She nodded at him. "Hard to say where the holes are, though. I've got every bit of knowledge the N7 program has on fighting, tactics, weapons. I've got sniper training, hand-to-hand, even some old school boxing and street brawling, I guess because the Commander was a street rat."

"Look, forgive me for saying it, but you don't seem quite as homicidal as your sister was."

She tried not to flinch. "I don't know," she said honestly. "I don't know what happened to her. I know her pod was stolen by an operative named Rasa."

"Brooks," Alenko said.

"Yeah, she had a lot of names. Went by Rasa, mostly. Rasa was trusted, but only to a point. They wanted her help on Lazarus, but she didn't know everything. She knew what they wanted her to know. So she knew about a clone, singular. After she left with the pod, Cerberus couldn't find her. So I couldn't find her. I kept thinking Rasa would go after Cerberus, so I figured somewhere out here, some facility must've run into them. Or maybe someone knew something about Rasa I could use to track them down."

She sighed, sat back further in her chair. "Waste of time, I guess. She's been dead all this time."

"After the Invasion," Alenko said, "after we took down Sanctuary."

"I was there," she said softly. "After you left. Just saw you, though. Nothing on my sister."

"By then, your…sister was on the Citadel with Brooks. Rasa."

Quinn laughed a little, not that there was any humor behind it. "I figured answers would be there. No chance of getting there, though. Not until they get the relays fixed. And the DNA sensors would lose their minds if I showed up."

"Right," Alenko said. "Same DNA as Kate."

"So that's it," she said, spreading her hands. "That's who I am. Where I came from. What I want. What I've been doing."

"So what's next, then?"

Next, she had to find some secure communications and get a message through to Terri. They deserved to know about their missing sister.

"You're the guys with the guns. You tell me."

Alenko looked over his shoulder at Vakarian, who just shrugged. "Beats me," the turian said. "I was with James there for most of it."

"We're not shooting her," Alenko said.

"We can't just let her loose," Vakarian countered. "What if she decides she does want to be fake-Shepard after all? It's not like anyone can call up the Citadel to confirm, or check her Spectre file."

"We stopped the last one. We stopped her this time."

"Yeah, and doesn't that bother you a little? Seemed kind easy."

"You think that was easy?" Quinn interrupted. "I had to blow up my own ship."

"One ship, big deal," Vakarian said, waving that off. "The real Shepard went down with hers. You clones will never get that you're not as good as the real thing."

She smiled at him, pleasant as could be. "I can kick your bony ass through the bulkhead, if it'll make you feel better."

"Enough," Alenko said.

"I don't want to be Kate Shepard," she said. "Maybe I don't know what I'll do now, or where I'll go, but I'm still alive. I'm still a person."

"Sort of."

"Y'know what, Vakarian, you get one more shitty comment and then I'm breaking off the other half of your face and feeding it to you."

That just made him laugh. "Really does sound like her, though."

"Okay, we're done here," Alenko stood. "K—Jane. Come with me. Garrus, go calibrate something, huh?"

He walked her back to the lift, past James and the guards. He waved them all off, just took her back into the CIC. There were a lot more people there than there had been. 

She knew some of them. Joker. Dr. Chakwas. That was Liara T'Soni standing next to Joker, staring at her with wide asarii eyes. 

Alenko followed her into the elevator. "Captain's quarters," he said.

Quinn arched an eyebrow at that. "You're taking me to your cabin? Should I be worried?"

He quirked half a smile, looking resolutely at the floor display. "Hard to get any privacy anywhere else," he said.

"You're not planning on kissing me again, right?"

"Yeah, um, about that. Sorry."

She smiled as the lift stopped. "Forget it," she said. "It was a nice kiss. I guess."

He stepped out first, the door to the cabin opening for him. "Wait, you guess? Ow."

Quinn walked into the cabin and looked around with unabashed curiosity. "Well, it was my first so not a lot of comparison, here."

"Your first?"

She looked over the extensive collection of ship models, then eyed the small glass cage on a shelf on the wall. "Yeah," she said, tapping a finger against the glass. A hamster ran out, looked at her a moment, squeaked, then ran back inside its shelter. "Clone, remember? Not a lot of hooking up opportunities on an empty station and I've been a little busy since."

She turned back to Alenko. "Not exactly a priority and all."

"No," he said, a bit awkwardly. "I uh… I guess not."

She frowned and took a longer look around. The medals. The display on the armor screen was a female silhouette. The picture in the frame on the desk was Alenko, and he didn't seem the type to keep a picture of himself. "This isn't your cabin," she said slowly. "This is hers."

"Ours," he corrected, following her down into the sleeping area and taking a seat on one of the low couches. "We shared it, the last few months."

"All her stuff, though."

"She'll be back." He sounded confident. "Didn't see any reason to change anything."

She didn't answer that.

"Can I ask you something else?" he asked.

Quinn fingered a holographic chess set. "Shoot," she said.

"What's your name?"

That got her attention off mementos. "What?"

"In the briefing room, you told Garrus you didn't want to be Kate Shepard. But you'd already said you were, that that was your name. Kate Shepard. I just figure if it was your name, you'd have said you didn't want to be 'her'. So… just us. What's your name?"

It was his gentleness that defeated her. She sat on the couch perpendicular to his and studied his expression.

"Quinn," she said finally.

"Quinn," he repeated, a faint smile making an appearance. "Nice to meet you, Quinn."

She looked away, uncomfortable for no reason she could name.

"You sure? I mean, we can keep going with Jane."

She chuckled at that, low and soft. "Nah," she said. "I don't really think I look like a Jane."

"That you don't," he murmured. "You look like a Kate."

Silence filled the cabin, broken only by the bubbles from the fish tank.

"You didn't ask me up here to get my name," she said finally.

"Like I said, privacy. Treating you like an enemy wasn't working." He hesitated. "It wouldn't work on her, either."

"Ah, I see," Quinn said, her own half-a-smile reappearing. "Using your inside info on me."

But he didn't answer. He was staring at her.

God, she could read him like a book. Pain. Again. "Hey. Kaidan," she said gently. "I'm not her."

"I know," he said, matching her quiet tone, his layered with regret. After a moment, he tried a laugh that didn't quite work. "You kiss different."

"Probably because kissing isn't genetic."

"No. Probably not."

She waited. There was more, there had to be. Something he wanted to ask her, wanted privacy for. 

"So, I'm thinking," he said.

"Uh huh…"

"We're heading for another Cerberus base. I want you on the squad."

"What?"

"You know Cerberus. You said yourself you didn't know what you wanted to do from here. I know you know how to fight. Seems a shame to let good genes go to waste."

But she did have something to do. She had to talk to Terri, ASAP. "I don't think the Alliance would be happy about a clone of one of their officers being on active duty."

He shrugged. "We're out of contact," he said. "Our QEC got damaged in a crash. I don't have any orders, so I'm basically winging it, taking relays as they get repaired."

She frowned. "And I really don't think you should be sharing ops status with me, especially anything about your ship's weaknesses." 

"Probably not, but the Spectre thing gets me out of a lot of trouble."

"With the Council, Alenko!" She leaned forward. "Your Alliance rank can still be taken for pulling stunts like that."

"If there even is an Alliance anymore!" he shot back, abrupt anger making his brow wrinkle, his eyes spit sparks. "You have no idea how bad it was on Earth, what it was like when I… When we left her. It!"

He rose to his feet and paced away three steps, as far as he could get without going out. She turned to keep him in sight. "I was in the med bay getting my lungs put back together. Liara, she made Joker… They left ahead of the energy surge. It still swatted us out of the sky like the Normandy was just a bug. How the hell he got the ship down, I don't know."

He turned back to her and gestured. "You wanna see the big giant patch on the hull? A rock, a damned rock, went right through the middle of my ship. It took us months to patch things up enough to be spaceworthy. The QEC jar was shattered, and it's not like you can just pick up any handful of random quantum particles, you need those specific ones, those ones that vibrate when their partners do."

"Cut off from everything, everyone, and the last thing I saw was Kate running toward that damned Reaper…"

He ran a hand through his hair, tried to pull it all back. His laugh was bitter, tired, and he sat down in the chair opposite her. "I… I knew. When I saw you, I mean, I knew." He shook his head, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. "I didn't want to know, lied to myself. I knew you weren't her. You didn't quite move right. You carry yourself differently. And the kiss…"

"It was nice," Quinn said quietly.

"Yeah. Yeah, it was nice. Kate doesn't kiss 'nice'."

Well, now she understood his 'ow' from earlier. "So why'm I here, Major?" she asked.

He just shook his head and looked down at his hands.

"I'm not a second chance," she said. "Not for her. Not for you. I'm just… someone who woke up a few months ago and had her one reason for going forward taken away from her in your briefing room."

He stood, walked back to the desk. She stayed on the couch, listening to him type. After a minute, he stood at the top of the few steps. "I told you I'd show you what happened," he said. "It's here if you want it."

He paused at the door, a pause that gave her time to process he intended to leave her alone in his cabin. Their cabin. Hers. "Quinn. How many of you are there?"

"One, Kaidan. There's only one of me."

He left.

She stayed on the couch. Did she want to watch another clone die? She thought briefly about trying to hack comms to call Terri, but only very briefly. Besides, Terri was likely on her way to one of the backups they'd decided on. After getting Quinn's last message, Jarrahe was a ball of plasma by now.

Slowly, Quinn began to wonder if she could ever see them again. Now that the entire crew of the Normandy was aware there was another Shepard clone out there in the universe, they'd never just let her walk around. Like that turian, Vakarian, had said. They couldn't know when she would decide to try to be Kate Shepard, trade in on her genetics.

Clones weren't people. They had no legal status. There wasn't a race in the Council that acknowledged a tank-bred clone as a living, thinking entity with rights. It was too much a grey area; how much of a clone still counted as an autonomous being? Was it okay to clone a body as long as it didn't have a brain? What if you were cloning just the brain?

So everyone had laws against clones and no one had any laws protecting them. The Alliance could decide to throw her out an airlock and no one would say a word.

Or if Kate Shepard really were dead, they could decide to use Quinn as a PR gambit, trot her out for appearances as Kate Shepard and then lock her in a box.

Hell, Cat had already had a run-in with someone who wanted their very own Kate Shepard sex toy. Not that he'd survived more than five seconds once he got his hands on Cat.

Or maybe it was better to stay out. Maybe it was better to see what they'd do with her. Then Terri and Cat could decide for themselves if they wanted to go deeper or step out.

Quinn rose and went to the computer, staring at the frozen screen. Given the presence of Rasa at her side, that must be the clone. The second one, they'd decided. Connie, in a bit of whimsy. She didn't look whimsical. She looked pissed.

Quinn sat and started the playback.

Two hours later, she leaned back. After a minute she reached out, tapped out a sequence, and replayed the last exchange between her two sisters.

_Take my hand._  
_And then?_  
_And then you live!_  
_For what?_

"Brooks got shot," Alenko said behind her. "Not long after that. She tried to escape and Shepard shot her."

"Good," Quinn said, staring at the frozen expression of fear on her sister's face as she fell. "She didn't have to be that. She didn't have to be what Rasa made her."

"I know."

"What the hell did she do to her? Gave her an implant, sure, but… She was…"

"Angry?"

Quinn tipped a faint smile at him. "I was gonna go with 'an asshole', but sure. Angry."

He chuckled and came closer, leaning a shoulder against the wall. "We may never know. We talked about it, y'know. Kate and me, I mean. The way Kate figured it, the clone didn't really ever have any choices. Or any chances. Even letting go like that. That's something Brooks did to her. It's why Kate tried to save the clone but killed Brooks."

"How'd it happen? Brooks."

"Like I said, she tried to run. Kate shot her in the back from about ten feet away."

"I think I'd like Kate Shepard."

"I think she'd like you, too."

Quinn stretched out her legs under the desk and folded one arm over her waist, lifting the other hand to tug at her lower lip.

"Every now and then," Alenko said softly, "you do something and it's like… She used to sit just like that. I mean, exactly like that. Why would something like that be genetic?"

She made herself stop doing it, sat up again. "Might not be," she said. "I get ghosts. Things I shouldn't know or expect, but I do. Like biotics." She gestured toward the screen. "Never had an implant. But sometimes in the middle of combat, I …" She shook her head. "I dunno, I expect something to happen and it doesn't. Like a shockwave, or a barrier."

"Really? That's… weird."

"That's what we said."

"We?"

Shit.

"It's ok," he said. "I know when you're lying. You have the same tells as Kate."

She angled a look up at him. "Tells?"

"Yeah. She stopped playing poker with me and James a long time ago. We wouldn't tell her what they were and she was losing her shirt."

He moved even closer, sat on a corner of the desk. "So I know there's at least one more clone out there. And I know you won't give her up. You're protecting her. Sister, right?" He shook his head. "I may not know what you think you're protecting her from, but I know not to get between you and anything you want to save. It's not healthy."

"It's a little unfair, you knowing so much about me," she said.

"I'll take every advantage I can get."

She looked back at the computer.

"Stay with us, Quinn. Trust me when I say you were made for this kind of life. You'll never be happy anywhere else. Stay."

"And then?" she echoed softly.

"And then…" He reached out and turned off the computer. "You live."

She thought about it. "They won't let me fit in," she said. "James. Vakarian."

"James idolized Kate. Still does. He'll come around. And Garrus is just concerned you're a better shot than he is. Kate was, or at least they argued about it all the time."

"It'll be weird for everyone."

"We have the universe's only Prothean on board, and you think one clone is going to be weird?"

She struggled to find another objection. "Will you let me send a message to my sister? Without tracking it or tagging it."

"We don't monitor the communications of our crew members."

"That's not an answer."

He turned her chair, made her face him. "She's your sister," he said. "You have the right to talk to her without us listening in. We won't track it or tag it. If it'll make you feel better, we can take you back to Omega, you can send something from there."

Wait. " _Back_ to Omega?"

"Yeah, we left there a couple of hours ago." He grinned. "Normandy's smooth like that. Half the time, you don't even feel the acceleration until we hit a relay."

"So I'm stuck here anyway."

"Let's say I wanted to make sure you didn't have any handy escape routes. You're a little too good at taking off."

"You keep finding me."

"I have about a hundred people helping me. Stay, Quinn."

She didn't answer. She thought about Terri. About Cat. Cat had her team she put together. Terri had the remnants of Cerberus she was fighting to reassemble against a few dozen competitors all with the same idea. Quinn's job had been to find their missing sister. She'd done that.

Could it be this easy? Just join the crew of the Normandy?

"When we get back to Alliance space, there are going to be questions."

"We'll answer them," he said. "And by the time we do, you'll be a proven member of the crew."

Still, she hesitated.

"I'm not saying it's going to be easy, Quinn. The other one, she and Brooks did a lot of damage. And some people will expect you to be Kate. But if you stay, if you work for it…" He looked at the far bulkhead, but his gaze was distant. "This ship. This crew? They're worth it. Everything you have to give, everything you sacrifice. They're worth it."

"That's a hell of a recruitment speech, Major."

His eyes slid sidelong to her. "Did it work?"

"Nah."

He laughed. "Liar."

She had to smile at him, couldn't help it. "I still want to send that message."

"I'll make it happen."

Quinn rose from the chair and extended a hand. "Then you've got yourself a recruit."

He shook her hand, then headed for the door again. "I'll make some arrangements, get you a bunk. Joker'll let you know when we're back at Omega so you can send your message."

"Hey, Kaidan?"

He stopped and looked back at her.

"Are you really sure about this?"

He grinned. "Welcome aboard, Quinn Shepard."

**Author's Note:**

> I never bought the notion that there was only one clone. It just didn't seem logical to me. Why risk the one 'real' body you have with unproven techniques? And what if some of those clones survived? What if they hadn't been taken by Brooks and brainwashed? What would they be like, what would they be doing? I finally decided to start writing down some of what happens to Quinn. For no reason I can name, I like her best.


End file.
